AMD DTX form factor

Posted on 01-03-2008

The Environment’s New Green Buddy

Not everyone wants to play games, and the performance you can get out of today’s PC is a lot more than required for basic office applications and movie playback, for example. AMD believes it’s time for cheap and quiet low-power PCs to make their mark and they’ve been pushing hard for it.

The DTX system uses a dual-core Athlon X2 BE-2350. The machine that we tested came with 1 GB of RAM and an onboard graphics solution. The entire PC was housed in a compact case with all the bells and whistles. No PS2 ports on this machine, so you will have to use a USB keyboard and mouse.

To keep it quiet, the CPU fan has been surrounded by a thick foam packing. The size of the motherboard itself is a tad smaller than the standard Micro-ATX. Even the hard drive is mounted vertically next to the memory card reader and optical disc drives. Things do tend to get hot because of the cramped layout, though.

In encoding tests and general synthetic tests on SiSoft Sandra, results were average. The advantage of using a dual-core processor was obvious as well—it ate through the 1080p HD clips that we threw at it. This setup isn’t cut out as a gaming PC at all—Doom 3 struggling at just 20fps at 800 x 600 and medium settings. The performance in Far Cry was a little better at 40fps at minimum settings, but gaming really isn’t going to be its forte.

As power efficient, quiet and cheap machine, it has everything going for it especially when there’s support from a large number of hardware manufacturers. There’s also a growing demand and trend in compact form factors as people start moving their PCs into their living rooms. If AMD is to market this product as an entry level PC or an HTPC, it has everything necessary to be a possible hit if they keep the price around the Rs 10,000 mark.